The Merger That Fills the Apparatus

In many Middle Indo-Aryan dialects this letter and the voiced labial stop fell together, so an inscription may write either where the Sanskrit form has only one. The alternation is among the commonest notes in any epigraphic apparatus, and it is a real feature of the spoken language rather than a scribal failing. Editions of the Ashokan edicts and of the donative records print the spelling actually cut and give the Sanskrit equivalent separately, and the apparatus recording such variants is often longer than the text it accompanies.

That practice is the settled discipline of Indian epigraphy and it exists for a reason. The earliest Brahmi material is the earliest substantial written evidence for any Indian language, and the variations in it are close to the whole of what is known about how the spoken language differed from place to place in the third century BCE. Normalising the spellings to Sanskrit would destroy exactly the evidence the inscriptions uniquely carry.

The merger also has a practical effect on reading. A word looked up under one letter may be cut with the other, and an index of an epigraphic corpus has to cross-reference the two. A reader working from Sanskrit habits will miss occurrences until the habit is unlearned.